The Connected Home

Xfinity is Comcast Cables Name for it's Family of Digital Services.

These include Cable TV, Internet Access and Phone service.

Comcast established the name XFINITY in 2010, but it has been slow to take hold in the market place.

Part of the reason for the name was to provide a separate identity for these services upon the merger of Comcast and NBC. The goal was to provide a brand name for the cable distribution system separate from the newly acquired Content and Broadcasting businesses.

Although this too is confusing as the key to Comcasts success has been in part to sell packages of programming to its subscribers.

XFINITY has four basic package choices that offer more than 200 channels as well as their ON Demand Movies and Shows.

They also provide the capability of adding DVR and HD service.

Their newest upgrade, XFINITY X1 is taking the Minneapolis St Paul market by storm. It offers greater flexibility and a voice activated menu that makes finding your favorite program much easier. It is also a useful tool when you are not quite sure what you are looking for.

For example, you can speak into the remote and ask for "a funny movie" and you will be presented with a series of movies, including some you can buy, rent or watch for free.​Now part of the package can also include broadband access and or phone service as well as a connection to ADT home security.

That has presented Comcast with some issues. They naturally want you to sign up for as many services as possible. You can tell just by calling their call center. It is clear that their operators are incentivized to upsell you to their phone as part of their Triple Play package.

And while it may make perfect sense for some, many of us these days have long ago cut the phone cord and rely on our cells. So why the hassle?

One good option if you are interested in an XFINITY sign up in Minnesota is to call, the Connected Home. The offer a FREE consultative service that cuts through the upsell nonsense, and helps you quickly pick the best package for your viewing and budget needs.

Even better, they can hook you up with Dish TV or DirecTV, if their service is a better fit. Their office is in Minneapolis but they pretty much serve the entire state. Once you have decided on your best choice they will schedule the actual installation and save you a lot of time and hassle. No need to deal with the various vendors sales pitches and confusing package offerings.

As the Olympics unfold, NBCUniversal is offering so much linear and digital Rio Olympic programming—6,755 hours overall—that not even the people behind it are quite sure how viewers should try to consume it all. "I have no idea. Good luck!" NBC Olympics executive producer Jim Bell joked to reporters last week."We've never had livestreaming integrated from the internet with live television in one seamless way," Brian Roberts, Comcast CEO and chairman, explained to reporters last month. He said that the X1 Rio experience represents his entire company "coming together.""Everything we've done is really with an eye, how can we extend this to other parts of the programming landscape," said Matt Strauss, Comcast cable's evp and gm of video services, who has been working with NBC on their Olympics strategy since shortly after the Sochi Winter Olympics ended in 2014. "It's very rare to have an event which captures so much attention of the country over such a long period of time—17 days—that it really becomes an incubator for us to test different features and to almost use the Olympics as a sandbox."

The Power of the X1 Platform, seems to winning new customers, who also like the voice activation feature.

The X1 is having its big introduction party during the Olympics, with a bunch of new features meant to transform how you watch and wring as much value as possible from the games. These features mostly revolve around different ways to personalize the games: following different sports, countries, or athletes; surfacing stats you want; or dropping you right in the action.But what's interesting about these features isn't that they're for the Olympics, but that they begin to reimagine the way you surf cable.Strauss wants X1 to be the "aggregator of aggregators," to tie together your cable package and other services like Netflix (which will come to the platform "later this year"). X1 will pluck what you want from it or let you go into individual apps. No more tyranny of apps — or channels, for that matter.But the second part of Comcast's plan is to use voice — and cable — as a foundation to manage your entire home. That goal pits it against not just Apple, but likely Amazon, Google, and even Microsoft. You can bet they will all be vying for that spot.Comcast seems to believe that whatever robot controls your house in the future will likely control your TV — and that direct relationship with the customer is valuable since without it, the cable company begins to feel like the unnecessary middleman between the people who actually make the shows and the people who watch them. No one wants to become a dumb pipe.So for Comcast, winning the future of TV could mean winning the entire house in the process.

As we see above, Comcast is looking forward to the fully connected Home, a theme we have been preparing for here in the Minneapolis St Paul area on your behalf.We do not just service Comcast, and we will work with you where ever you live with other cable or satellite providers as well as ADT home security. However, we cannot help but note that Comcast is preparing for the future in a more obvious manner than most with its X1 capabilities.